Today's health care facilities include a wide range of establishments, from small and relatively simple medical clinics to large and complex hospitals. All together, health care facilities use a large amount of medical products for treating patients having various health conditions. In some instances, it is required to keep track of products that have been used for treatment, or installed within patients, to ensure compatibility or to readily be able to contact patients for product recalls. More particularly, in large hospitals, keeping track of such products that have been used on or installed within patients is a challenge, as it is performed manually, requires filling multiple forms which is time consuming and limited by practitioners and personal vigilance and discipline. It is thus obvious that such a manual tracking is only performed for specific products which are either more expensive or potentially health dangerous.
In addition to the tracking problem, hospitals also face an important challenge with the management of expiry dates and recalls of lots of medical products. Nowadays, the tracking of expiration dates and recalls of lots of medical products is performed manually. A first control method consists of having a person go through the various medical products at all units and departments to manually check the expiration date and/or the lot number of each medical product, and to remove the medical products which expiration date has lapsed or which lot number has been recalled. As this type of control cannot be performed on a daily or weekly basis, the medical products with the closest expiration date are placed in the front, and the products with the furthest expiration date are placed in the back, to ensure that closely expiring medical products are used first. In addition to this control method, practitioners and personal has to further review prior to using a medical product that the expiration date has not lapsed. Although verification is performed in two steps, there have been reported instances where medical products used were expired or were recalled.
It would therefore be advantageous to have a system and method to more efficiently handle expiration dates and recalls of medical products.